Wolf
by AThousandYearsOfPain
Summary: The Forest is dead, and Wolf is hungry. But the flash of a red coat seems a welcome distraction. A variation of the Little Red Riding Hood story...influenced by Angela Carter, but with a lot less meaning.


I tried to do a Carter story...needless to say I have a long way to go xx

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Wolf

A needle punched through fluffed skin, pulled tight like drum, and the repetitive snap of the leather creates a beat. The clock emulates this and soon the hand is upside down from its start, a slow decline marking a long wait. The red is pulled up over a young girls face and her nose is scrunched as though her own smell disgusts her, hair so tight back she is in permanent surprise. Her head is covered and the sewing continues. Up past a mouth and a tongue between a squinting blank glass eye, she seems to shrink and curl into herself.

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Magic curls around trees, weighing heavily on the wet leaves lips, pushing and weaving from a small cottage deep in the woods. The birds feel it and fly. The animals run as the spell rains on them, dense like pure white snow, and cloys sticking into their furry throats. It yawns stroking its way to the ground, through dark green ferns and bluebells and delicate foxgloves. It's touch rots them.

They have become concave melting deep as the magic brings fogged night and a pleasant stench to the soil, which now feels like sand. It runs clawed fingers in the sandsoil to shift and search, uncovering squirming worms, then patting them to grey around the edges. They flop lifeless, lustreless, like a dying fish half decayed.

And there lies the wolf under a dying tree.

Wolf sleeps dreaming, of catching girls to eat and cottages that smell like little old ladies with a gift of wine to celebrate when he has finished his hunt. He twitches and smiles a wide wolf grin stretching his face into a mask fit for tricks and treating. The magic descends the kindly hand of a dark shortcut alleyway, and twiddles his ears, whispering between the hairs. Wake up, Wolf. A snuffle and his eyelids see the back of his eye, his heart jumpstarts and Wolf is hungry. A need for meat has set in his stomach deep down into his toes pulling him and anchoring him into a search for sustenance.

He jumps paws downwards, head high and he is dizzy, floating far above the trees but the sweet death smell shows him there is wrong. Trotting forwards he nudges a dead brown flower with his nose, whining when it falls to the ground stem not setting it right. He fell asleep next to water; its noisy roar beckons his belly, near stretched from starvation, Wolf was confused. Before he had slept he had ate. Three pretty little baby rabbits, soft fur and squinty eyes all at home in his stomach, stretched and cosy within a tasty blood marinade. Wolf trots to the river, hind legs swaying, which is coloured deep dank purple as fish float bloated, their own rafts, for their corpses to follow the length of the water. However all smells right so he slurps to fill his screaming hollow tummy, he feels the water slosh into him. Following the path set by his oesophagus to be cooling and refreshing.

By the time he has drank enough to fill several wolves he knows it is even more wrong than he thought, he is almost crippled. Back curves forward hunching him into obscurity his hunger erupts screaming at his brain, the more he sips the more his body rebels until the water escapes in lonely desperate tears. So Wolf stops drinking.

Wolf is clever, a hunter, his brain lectures him-he needs a new plan. His head reached back and he howls long and clear, the noise echoing in an empty wood, vibrating through the valley. As though the lands ear drums had decided to respond the only answer he heard was his own repeating howl, and he stopped, listening to the world fester and putrefy around him. No little ones scuffling and the deep footfalls of Bear were still empty, his world empty. But the worms were still grey and flailing.

And Wolf was still hungry.

He took a cautious bite as though scared he would be caught and his reputation spoilt like the deep bitter milk he stole from the people. Nibbling softly his mouth frowning repulsed, Wolf's heart sighed, for a brief moment his hunger had been sated, but now he had swallowed the pangs returned. So he began to eat faster, until his belly was distended and swollen, kwashiorkor's, and he was no longer content.

He paused to look for his next meal, and the worms had all visited his stomach, emptiness swallowed him whole, and his black eyes reflected the death around him. Wolf slept, now dreamless.

Rustling pushed his shoulder and he lifted a weary head, heavy as a bowling ball suspended by a pencil, swinging in a similar manner. He lifted geriatricly determined, pushing his legs forward to suspend the ribs that held him together. He crept behind a bush.

Scarlet fur stood on end of a pretty young girl fox; she played childishly with a bushy bouncing tail, scampering after the fallen gooey leaves happy in her own right. Stitches ran down the length of her body holding her organs in it seemed, Wolf wanted to rip them open and feast on her in to out. Her eyes glinted in the sun that penetrated through fog, creating a spotlight, her red hair the adornment of the precious diva.

He creaked forward and she heard him. Fox's eyes flashed, she was still playing, and her glamorous poise mocked him, her spine straight as a bullet heading towards his forehead. The chase began, mock fun, to hide a deep dank hunger that had seeped into his tired bones, his muscles that cramped, wincing themselves piteously at the hurt in his other limbs. As they ran the woods grew darker, more sinister, like a wolfhome, they wound the trail of a snake tripping over paws but not affording to stop. The time swam, fur gained water weight in the struggle to keep moving.

Fox ran into a warmth-radiating cottage, small with yellow bricks uneven as they stole the suns colour, grey slate lined the roof neatly arranged like crops in a flourishing field. Window hatches painted to match the golden brown door, were open to show pieces of broken coloured glass stuck to make glowing windows. Blues, pinks, oranges, growling greens and other rainbows fell on the dying grass of the wood, as candlelight flowed from the building.

Wolf hesitated; it did not seem a place for dirty paws, and hungry maws, but his growling body told him he had little choice. So he followed Fox through the door. The sudden light blinded him.

The scruff of his neck was grasped by aging bony fingers and he was flung sideways into the side off a wooden cage, splinters biting his side, scratching some of his coat from his body. His shoulder blades crunched together as he slammed into an instinctual ball of defence. Eyes opened in caution, to stare into a dank moulding hovel that was as bright as the outside of the building, although the heat only seemed to serve in the growth of bacteria. Bones hung in despicable wind chimes, clanging as invisible unfeeling wind tickled the walls, melting candles wax-held on every surface and in concave structures that seemed to act as shrines to the blinding light. Furs were piled in a corner of every kind and colour, apart from the coat he knew so well, the collection lacking in Wolf. Knives with serrated edges hung on wooden pegs, blood dried dripping like tears, next to a bucket in which Wolf could smell liver and eyes and lungs and heart and other delicious meal that made his stomach rumble. He trembled in covetous desire his nose pushing through the bars in the direction of the hunger quenching gifts.

An old hag, owner of the bony hands sniffed, wiping her hands on dirt and blood encrusted apron, teeth smiling by themselves covered in the pulp of her plaque. Her lips were the colour of bruised peach, her yellow soaked hair matching the hue of her skin. Her eyes were hidden by a hat of dirty cloth that hung on her head, a strong feeling of religious excuse enveloped the women even though her aura ripple like a sinister black cloud. Fox sat triumphantly on the woman's lap, picking at her sleeve gently with claws that had help trap and trick the exhaustedly resigned Wolf.

She held Fox to her chest, clutching to the vulnerable animal perhaps to tightly, as words spun whispered into the ears of the fox, causing the stitches to slowly unravel, until the skin dropped to the floor and a girl stepped out. Naked from the unveiling of her red cloaked body, she was thin and suspiciously tall, proud in her defiance of the nature of embarrassment. She revelled in the revelation, as Wolf's eyes widened like a fox in a henhouse, like Fox as she looked upon his fur.

Fox smirked, "Why, Grandmother what fine fur Wolf has!"

Her fingers twitched forward to caress the top of his head, to dance to the bottom of jaw, a croaking voice answered, "All the better to warm you with, my dear," Grandmother chuckled, gargling as phlegm flew from her chest to her throat, she spat it into the corner of the cottage.

Fox ran to her Grandmother, threading her fingers through the older woman's grease helmeted hair, leaning intimately to whisper in her ear, "Why, what fine eyes Wolf has, Grandmother!"

"Ah, my darling, all the better to see you with!" The cloth fell from the women's head; scar lined from the left to right from both of her temple, through the corners of each eye, badger eyes sank into her head. The wrong size and colour for her face, horrifically placed, giving one the shock of meeting a dear friend in a place they do not belong.

"Yes, yours have been getting rather tired now." Fox stated.

Grandmother leant forward, her breasts shifting, like the wind shifts a sweeping tide aside angrily, violently, as her bones creaked forward.

"Why, little one, what fine paws Wolf has," Exclaimed the aging witch.

"When they are mine they shall be all the better to run with," Sung Fox as she spun circling excitedly, a child with their dearest gift on Christmas has never looked so joyful. Her feet pounded into the ground in a dance of utter elation, she turned to grasp one of the fearful knives, for her power bended them to her will. Grandmother smiled at the girl's joy, which too had sprung in her heart warming her body and easing her arthritis. "Are you ready, my dear?"

Fox's head tilted forward in the silent permission, she herself was not permitted to give, Wolf snarled backing into space in the cage he didn't have, the deep hunger in his limbs prevented him from escaping further back. "I am glad we made him hungry first Grandmother, otherwise this would be much more effort that It is worth." The pause costed her her prize.

Wolf scrabbles in the dirt to break free, and the cage bends, hunger drives him forwards as he leaps and tears, rips, bites. Atrial blood squirts painting the room vibrantly.

The magic's source destroyed it retracts from the woods, racing itself to its point of origin; trees began to regrow to their former glory stretching out to the sun, reaching branches far and further than ever before. Flowers worshiped each other; opening as though spring itself had blessed them, leaves uncurled hydrating themselves in the restored atmosphere. Fish took deep gaping breaths of air, as their scales rippled into beautiful colours that had never graced them previously, the water dulled to a crystal blue, smiling upon itself to give a gift of renewed life to the drinker. The worms in Wolf's belly, wriggled and the magic took them home spreading pink into their skin, replacing them in the stomach acid with three little baby rabbits.

The candles dimmed in disappointment, and the fur evaporated into nothingness.

A bemused Wolf sits in the remains of the Witches home, chewing upon his reward of the still warm bucketed meal, and the remains of his captors.

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Please review it helps me get better...and its nice to know if people actually read my work.....


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